


An Act of Retreat

by TrivialPursuit



Category: Homicide: Life on the Streets, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 12:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Baltimore is a war zone, John Munch is in retreat.</p><p>(In which John Much both hates and loves New York City.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Act of Retreat

John Munch fucking hates New York.

The people are assholes - and that's saying a lot coming from Baltimore -, the traffic is fucked, his apartment is the size of a shoebox and John pays twice what he paid for an apartment three times as big back in Baltimore, it's damn near impossible to own a car, and all the cops are so fucking righteous and entitled it is unbelievable how much they resemble whiney children.

Somewhere between handing in his papers and sitting down at his new desk in a new city for the first time he wonders if it's cowardice that drives him away from Baltimore, because that's just it, isn't it? He's not going to anything better, no matter what he tells everyone, he's not going to a city of oppotunity, he's leaving a mother who is eating her children alive.

'The War on Drugs' the men on TV say from behind their podiums, reciting facts and figures and whipping everyone up into a frenzy. Bullshit. Wars end and this shit will never end, not for a million years.  And maybe it's cowardly or selfish or foolish, but John Munch doesn't want to be a soldier in a war his side can't possibly win. Baltimore is the front lines and so John Much retreats to a city that likes to claim to be the front lines but doesn't have the body count to make it stick.

He spends his first week of work constantly irritated with his new coworkers, all of whom spend most of their time sitting around on their asses bitching about the amount of paperwork they all sit around doing. The cop bars are ridiculously cliché and even if they were any good a guy can't get drunk with his comrades-at-arms without being labelled an 'alcoholic'. It's like he lives in an episode of _The Rockford Files_ , but John would rather die the become the thirtysomething balding detective with no personality that some fucktard PI called 'Den'.

His partner's a young, touchy-feely, PC, pussy-footer, climber type named Alvarez who wouldn't have lasted a day back home. One venture into the low-rises would chew the poor fucker up and spit him out, not even worthy of full digestion. John Munch has never had much respect for the that type of police. They can get as emotionally involved as they want, but, at the end of the day, their tears won't bring the dead kid back to life. In his experience, even the good ones that are empathetic still end up burning out, often driving themselves towards nervous breakdowns, the very skills that made them Good Police suddenly turning against them.

At his new precinct the other detectives mock him and call him 'Baltimore', as if being from the ouroboros of cities somehow makes him unequipped to deal with crime in the Big Apple. As if watching kids who should be in school shoot at each other means that he is too small-town to fill out stolen item forms because Burglary is understaffed again.

At the end of the week, when he's halfway through the bottle of Jameson, somewhere on the scale of drunkness between maudlin and drunk-dialling his ex wife, self-pityingly wishing he'd never left Baltimore, he realizes that he hasn't caught a single murder the entire week.

John Munch fucking loves New York.

_"Fighting the war on drugs... one brutality case at a time."_   
_"Girl, you can't even think of calling this shit a war."_   
_"Why not?"_   
_"Wars end."_   
_-The Wire, "The Target"_


End file.
